You're right, I drifted from the comment to perceived patterns about the person. I continue to have difficulty with SIWOTI, and must continue working on that. I've made some progress but have also stumbled. I am sorry about that.

I suggest that when curious goes after you, just point out his ad hom focus, and do not respond. Don't respond with overt insults. Curious definitely has a hard on for you. One of his more creative insults of me was to say that 'you're not as dumb as marcus'. I have no doubt he has a bookmark folder for you with all of the posts he thinks he can use to show us how dumb you are.

@YesYNot, I decided to reply to your vulgar and false comment here rather than continue to detract from the terrorism thread. I am uninterested in marcus, as is almost everyone else apparently. He insists that I hate him, but that's not even true. He trolls people all the time, trying to make them hate him, and he becomes emotionally overwrought when they simply prove him wrong using evidence and reason.

Also, you are either really bad at paraphrasing and search engines, or you are lying yet again.Here is the comment you distorted above. I did not call either of you dumb, but you do both lack integrity.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak outâ€”
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak outâ€”
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for meâ€”and there was no one left to speak for me."

Atheists are disbelievers, blasphemers, and now by definition terrorists according to Saudi law. I hope they won't find you, @YesYNot, but they do have a plan. I suggest you should speak out while you still can, and not throw kids out of planes without their consent, even if you enjoy parachuting in your spare time. There is nothing virtuous about spreading Islam. If MSM photos of hapless Muslims (notice they don't show hapless Hindus or Buddhists) require you to do something for Muslims, send them some Richard Dawkins books (which they will probably burn).

@FP, if you want to call me a monkey, at least you could refrain from littering other threads with your ad hominem irrelevance. Use this reply thread.

I look forward to the documentary, btw. Patient person tries to educate a snarky troll who keeps calling him a monkey. If you're anything like marcus, you'll start exploding when you see that you can't make me hate you. I persist in giving you additional chances to redeem yourself. Someday, you might get it right.

You might refrain from lying so much, or from being such a pathetic and hateful little prick.

***

But you're a low integrity dirtbag....

@marcus, rather than encourage you to hijack yet another thread with your egomania, I'm replying in this reply thread. You seem to be trying yet again to make me hate you, and it doesn't work. I remain patient with you, even though your behavior does raise real concerns if you have any exposure to children. Especially when proven obviously wrong, you explode emotionally into the most abusive and baseless attacks and profanity that you can hurl. You struggle even with ordinal numbers, and lack the reasoning ability that teaching math would require. If you did actually care about integrity, you would link to objective evidence and then reason based on that, rather than obsessing and exploding over your own subjective feelings of butthurt.

Here are at least 10 of the many different Users whom you have called "dimbulbs":

@FP, you fail even at ignoring me, in addition to failing at logic. What motivates your snarky trolling, anyway? What do you gain from it? Is it like when you hire Muslims so their careers depend on you and then you can make fun of their religion? Do you get off on bullying people and making fun of them? I'm really curious, I don't see what you gain by trolling people and saying obviously illogical things. It looks like a complete waste of time, yet you persist.

@zzyzzx - Thanks for the replies per Baltimore. Forgot about Fort McHenry - probably could deal with one day or so in the ultra touristy harbor but I had a nice time in Salisbury on a work assignment some time back. The crab cakes etc. were really great so I could definitely get into that again.

The solution is simple. For this and all other hard A.I. problems, simply represent the problem as a captcha. Then the spammers will figure out how to solve the problem. Trace back their IPs to their servers and steal their code and make it public domain. Science advances.

@anonymous thank you for your kind reply. My wife discussed this and mentioned that she thinks you can't do it unless you come back periodically (period of months) to an American address which to me would be an undesirable situation.

I would appreciate your email addy. I might send something since I enjoy reading your comments and posts.

TPB is and has been on my ignore list, I burned out on his miserable carping long ago as Captain Shaddup

@curious2, I've actually wanted to ask this for a while and I'm sure it may have been asked of you already. Why do you make entire paragraphs and like in the case above, the entire comment a link? I'm not sure I've ever really seen someone do it and just wondering if you have a reason for doing it.

Note: This is why I hate text/written words. I'm not trying to be an ass here if it seems like it. No pun intended, but I'm genuinely curious.

@WookieMan, if you want to ask questions that are off topic, or make comments that are off topic, I encourage you to use this reply thread.

Nobody else has asked me that question. I don't even really understand the purpose of the question.

I link to enable readers to click or tap on the excerpt read the whole story. When I make a whole paragraph or comment a link, the purpose is to show clearly that the words come from an external source, and to encourage reading the whole story.

If you hate written words, then some people might wonder why you spend time in a forum that consists mostly of text, which you hate. Patrick is always trying to grow the site, so if you can bring some other way of communicating online that might draw people who hate words, go ahead. One caveat: I like written words, and I dislike videos that launch by themselves, so if you post random videos auto-playing, I might have to ignore you in order to keep my screen stable.

I link to enable readers to click or tap on the excerpt read the whole story. When I make a whole paragraph or comment a link, the purpose is to show clearly that the words come from an external source, and to encourage reading the whole story.

I had no intention of coming across as a jerk. So please don't take it that way. Linking all the text in a paragraph doesn't accomplish that though in my opinion. If I'm using words from an article in my post or comment I'll just do a quote from another user and then copy and paste the content I'm copying from another site, of course deleting the original quote material, and placing the content in between the

tags. That way the content has the typical quote (indented) format that you'd see on most sites. And then just link the source at the beginning or end.

Again, for me this was just a stylistic question. Not saying you're doing it wrong by any means. Your explanation make sense, I'll just be honest that I wouldn't do it that way, but now that you've explained it, I will understand your posts better. Thanks.

anonymous @ 92Great link! “I cannot imagine what you are referring to.”That cracked me up.I'll be using that when I do something stupid,which is often.

I'll be 69,12/30/2017. I feel like a child most of the time.That's what happens when one enter their second childhood.There are 5 to 10 dear? that come to a salt block that are almost pets & acovey of quail that are getting use to my wife & I.The quail feed at the chicken coop everyday.They have taken the place of "Miss Piggy".

Hi @anonymous I did remove that thread. Insulting the site is insulting me, therefore out of bounds.

If you have constructive comments, I'd love to see them, but simply hating on the site is not doing anyone any good.

Maybe you could try to reach people and figure out why they feel the way they do. Joe Simitian did this brilliantly in his interviews with people who voted for Obama and then for Trump. The answer was that they really didn't want Hillary, especially after she knifed Bernie, and all other considerations were secondary. Simitian was kind of surprised, but it seems pretty obvious to me now.

Even if you won't borrow money yourself, they borrow it in your name and tax you to pay the interest.

This "they" you speak of, are any Democrats & Republicans that the brilliant electorate choose.Those that vote against their own best interest get what they deserve. It sad that they are only capable of one of two decision,because there are no others.Watching FOX,following breitbart & Trump rallies/ CNN,MSNBC & Democratic Underground gives one some great examples of brainwashing.

I do respect ~126,000,000 voters determination to defend their brainwashing.I'm always looking for the best out of the clever ape.

Hence the SOLE reasons (from the bankster's point of view) for the Fed and the income tax. It is no coincidence that both were enacted at the same time.

Pay attention to the bold part below, kiddies. Cause there will be a test later on this.

The Fed exists to create money its owners don't have to loan the money to America to put it into hock. The income tax exists to PAY THE INTEREST (not principle!) on that debt.

It didn't happen over night and those pesky politicians paid down the vast debt the nation built up during WWII. BUT, after dumping the gold standard unleashed the Monster of Usury, the plan kicked into high gear and we have been living under it ever since.

It's all about forcing people to labor for the benefit of the top 0.001%.

The British were having a hard time getting East African pastoralists to be obedient servants in the 1800's until they imposed a tax on all of them, payable in British silver coins only. Where were cow herders going to get British silver coins? Only by working for their British masters.

We basically have the same thing today. Everyone needs Federal Reserve Notes to pay taxes of various kinds. The only source of these Notes is the Fed. Therefore, everyone indirectly works for the Fed, which is a private corporation, not the government.

It's all about forcing people to labor for the benefit of the top 0.001%.

The British were having a hard time getting East African pastoralists to be obedient servants in the 1800's until they imposed a tax on all of them, payable in British silver coins only. Where were cow herders going to get British silver coins? Only by working for their British masters.

We basically have the same thing today. Everyone needs Federal Reserve Notes to pay taxes of various kinds. The only source of these Notes is the Fed. Therefore, everyone indirectly works for the Fed, which is a private corporation, not the government.

Yup. Stefan Molyneux first became a big name on the internet because of his Youtube lecture The Story of Your Enslavement.

This is why the plantation owners actually came out ahead after the slaves were freed and the sharecropping system was implemented.

And why future tech that allows people to become more autarkic -- either in small groups or individually -- will NOT be popular with the PTB. Because more individual ownership/control of the means of production = less monetization of economic activity. Less monetization of economic activity means less revenue from 'human farming'...both private and governmental.

So, the ability for a small group of people to GO GALT! via bootstrapping up an Atomically Precise Manufacturing facility that could produce everything one would need for food, power, clothing, transportation, housing and even -- eventually -- most health care, will not go down well with the Big Boys. Oh they could care less about the less valuable human slaves (welfare recipients, for example). Let them live in favellas under the freeway overpasses for all they care. But the productive folks who decide to stop being good, hardworking debt/tax slaves....no way, Jose!

My politics have already been hijacked by reality. I used to be a leftist true believer who just could not understand how the right was so easily manipulated. Then I started understanding the fundamental self-interest and fears which drive the surface rationalizations on both sides

#MeToo. I remember even signaling virtue by approving of Red Ken's Muslim schools in London, mainly because Margaret Thatcher opposed them. I see now she was right about them.

Many years ago, there was a saying that the further a person is from events, the more likely he is to believe the press coverage; conversely, the nearer to events, the more likely he is to see the errors in the press coverage. I tried to find the exact quotation, but it is buried now under a haystack of recent articles about fake news. BTW, Scott Adams had a really good comment on fake news, balancing outright falsehoods that fool small audiences vs mainstream presentations that are cherry-picked and spun to mislead mass audiences.

In the USA, major parties function similarly to TV networks, aggregating audiences and selling them to corporate sponsors. If you watch the evening "news," you can see a series of misleading stories promoted by public relations firms, interspersed with advertisements for products that would probably make you worse off.

An interesting documentary on the global arms industry included an interview with an arms dealer who said politicians are mostly mid-level sales executives for arms manufacturers. During the Obama administration, a commerce department official proclaimed himself proud that America had 60% of the global arms export market.

Personally, I am either blessed or cursed with a sharp memory. I remember candidate Obama campaigning against "Hillary's Plan," now called Obamacare. I remember Democrats voting against that plan, and voting for him instead. Then, I remember seeing Democrats spin 180 degrees to embrace "Hillary's Plan," now called Obamacare, or Obamneycare, since even President Obama admitted it was the same thing as Romneycare. The Romneycare data disproved all the Democrats' promises about what Obamacare would do: Democrats promised insurance premiums would go down due to fewer emergency hospitalizations, but Romneycare showed both premiums and emergency hospitalizations went up. (Medicare data show most of Medicare's emergency hospitalizations result from Rx drugs, and a PatNet user recounted his own experience going to a hospital emergency room due to a prescribed SSRI.) As I saw Democrats spin 180 degrees, saying the opposite of what they had said just a year before, I saw partisan identity persuaded people much more than obective reality, no matter how thoroughly proved.

Scott Adams wrote about that too, predicting President Trump would change people's perceptions of reality itself. He wrote that people are not evolved to perceive objective reality; people are evolved to believe whatever illusions enable them to survive and reproduce, and those tend to involve agreeing with the tribe.

After seeing through the Democrats' suddenly changed position on health care, I started to see other problems too, e.g. Democrats' support for Islam. Hillary Clinton started the "tradition" of White House iftar dinners, around the same time the Clinton administration bombed America's Serbian allies on behalf of KSA and other Petrodollar states. Russians tried to point out that the Serbians had been allies of the USA during WWII, while the Bozniaks had joined the Nazi SS, but Petrodollars talk louder than history. The Serbs got bombed and prosecuted as war criminals, Islam retained its European territory, and the Clintons and their foundation received tens of million$ of Petrodollars from KSA. Spreading Islam is 180 degrees opposite to everything "liberal" Democrats claim to believe in, and yet it is the policy of the Democratic party.

But now even President Trump, possibly the first President to speak candidly about Islam since John Quincy Adams, celebrated an iftar dinner.

In 1968, at the height of the illegal war in Viet Nam, Gore Vidal said there was no difference between the two major parties because they both get their money from the same sources. At this point, Democrats are more likely to identify as "liberal", and Republicans are more likely to identify as "conservative", but both parties seem neither liberal nor conservative. Two Presidents in a row have doubled the national debt, and the current incumbent seems likely to do the same if he can. Republicans increased federal power with the "Patriot Act", and Democrats went even further with Obamacare. Both parties agree on what matters most to them: consolidate their own power, including especially in the form of revenue/spending.

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